Posted on 06/29/2008 5:50:12 AM PDT by forkinsocket
On February 17, 2008, Kosovo declared independence from Serbia. Some are concerned about what NATO, the United Nations, and the European Union have nurtured there since the military and humanitarian intervention in 1999. James Jatras, a U.S.-based advocate for the Serbian Orthodox Community, put it bluntly last year when he said Kosovo was a “a beachhead into the rest of Europe” for “radical Muslims” and “terrorist elements.” It’s an assertion without evidence. “We’ve been here for so long,” said United States Army Sergeant Zachary Gore in Eastern Kosovo, “and not seen any evidence of it, that we’ve reached the assumption that it is not a viable threat.”
Nine in 10 of Kosovo’s citizens are ethnic Albanians, and more than 90 per cent of them are at least nominal Muslims. Most are so thoroughly modern and secularised that moderate doesn’t quite say it. The only word that can fairly describe Islam as practiced by the majority of Albanian Muslims is liberal. No nation can be entirely free of extremists, but Kosovo is one of the least religiously extreme Muslim-majority countries on Earth. Radical Islamists aren’t there in significant numbers now, and they aren’t likely to be in the future. Some places may be fertile ground for radicalism in the future, but Kosovo isn’t one of them for many of the same reasons that Christian theocracy isn’t coming to Western Europe.
I arrived here shortly after the declaration of independence, and the first thing I looked for – as always when I visit a Muslim-majority country – was the treatment and status of women.
Women who dress with their hair, ankles, and sometimes even faces showing in places like Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the Taliban-controlled parts of Afghanistan are often beaten or worse.
In Kosovo, by contrast, almost all women, even in small villages, dress like women in the rest of Europe. Streets, cafés, restaurants, and bars are not all-male affairs as they are in much of the Islamic world, where women spend almost all their lives behind walls. If it weren’t for the occasional mosque minaret on the skyline, there is little visible evidence that Kosovo is a Muslim-majority country at all. Kosovo looks, feels, and is European.
A small number of well-heeled Islamic extremists from the Gulf states have moved into Kosovo to rebuild damaged mosques and transform liberal Balkan Islam into the more severe version found in the deserts of Saudi Arabia. They’ve had a small amount of success with a similar project in nearby Bosnia, but they’re meeting stiffer resistance from Kosovo’s religious community as well as from secular citizens.
“We are working very hard to stop these kinds of movements,” said Professor Xhabir Hamiti, of the Islamic studies department at the University of Pristina. “These kinds of movements are dangerous for all nations, for all faiths, for all religions. We are Muslims, but we think the European way. I am a Muslim, I am a scholar, I know how to deal with Islam in my country. There is no need for Arabs to come here. I have no need for their suggestions, no need for their explanations. We created our Islam ourselves here, and we can continue our Islam with our own minds.”
It would be wrong to suggest Kosovo has no Islamists at all, but in the last election in late 2007, the country’s single Islamic party gained only 1.7 per cent of the vote. Kosovo is not the Middle East, and Albanians are not Arabs. The majority converted to Islam relatively recently under Turkish Ottoman rule, and Albanian culture was first solidly Christian. “We Albanians,” Dom Lush Gjergji recently wrote, “descendants of the Illyrians, are Christians from the time of the Apostles… Without Christianity there would be no Albanian people, language, culture, or traditions… Albanians consider Christianity their patrimony, their spiritual and cultural inheritance.” Gjergji is a Catholic priest, but I heard similar comments from many who self-identify as Muslims. “Albanian people are not very religious,” said Agron Rezniqi, of the Friendship Association between Kosovo and Israel “We come from Catholicism, and for that, we are not such strong Muslims.”
Perhaps the best evidence available that Albanian Muslims, in both Kosovo and Albania proper, differ radically from their Arab world counterparts is their relationship with Jews and with Israel. Jews in Albania had an almost 100 per cent survival rate during the Nazi occupation. The country was known as a safe haven where Jews could find protection under the noses of the German authorities. According to Dan Michman, chief historian at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, there were three times as many Jews in Albania at the end of the Second World War as there were at the beginning.
Both Albania and Kosovo have excellent relations with Israel, and Israelis are more than welcome to travel and even live among Albanians. An Israeli from Tel Aviv named Shachar Caspi opened a bakery and a bistro bar in Pristina. “Nobody has given me any problems or been against Israel,” he told me. “[Kosovars] had good relations with Jewish people even back in the old days. And nobody here is radical. On the contrary, people are very warm, they are very nice, they have taken Islam to a beautiful place, not to a violent place. When they hear I am Israeli, the way they react, they react very warmly.”
Much of the angst about Kosovo’s alleged radicalism centres on the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), an organisation that no longer even exists.
It was a short-lived guerrilla movement that rose up against Slobodan Milosevic’s régime, first to fight for independence from an apartheid-like system, and later as a defence against mass murder and ethnic-cleansing. The KLA was always thoroughly secular and in no way resembled a Balkan Hamas or Hezbollah.
Its leaders also distinguished themselves from their Bosnian counterparts when they flatly refused assistance from Arabic mujahideen who wanted to fight a holy war there against Serbs. Albanians don’t fight religious wars, not against themselves, and not against others.
There has been no fighting or even tension between Muslim and Christian Albanians, only between Serbs and Albanians.
The danger in Kosovo isn’t that international peace keepers are nurturing a jihad state. Rather, a premature withdrawal may lead to a resumption of the fighting between Serbs and Albanians that they moved in to stop in the first place.
The Popeye's Chicken campaign, code named "Deep Fry".
“We barely survived the Slav invasions.”
No you didn`t because you WERE NOT IN BALKANS IN V-VI CENT A.D.!!! Once and for all ALBANIANS ARE NOT DESCENDANTS OF ILLIRYANS, WHO DISSAPEARED THROUGH WARS WITH ROMANS AND LATER PEOPLES-MOVING DURING MIGRATIONS
Albanian language, genetics etc has nothing to do with Illyrians (and stil today we do not have enough information about them)!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Even Italians do not claim to be direct descendants of old Romans. There`s no nation in Europe who can say to be pure in race or keep same genetic, cultural, linguistic caracteristics like 2-3000 years ago.
You better start to fill your books with facts and credible sources...soon you do that, sooner you will find your real national identity without need to forge another peoples history and tradition. You have a big stock-links for this kind of BS are you. Giving DNA “proofs” without any research summary in diagrams of H-types is not even funny, because it just shows your desperate need to proove your “origins” like an excuse for grabbing more lands and shouting how you are better then any other nation in Balkans is another example of nazi-aryan-eugenic BS.
You have here a kind of summary of historical facts (of many links and history books I ran into). I suggest you read it carefully, because this is more-less what all of your neighbours can read in their history books. With what I wrote before and also about Skenderbeg, you have enough material to start to develope your thinking in right direction.
Note: “aryan” here is used as term for indo-european and does not have any political pretext.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mb585SyoXLo
If you prefere “lighter” tones, you have the same here but in shorter version:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-vYBo3jZHg&feature=user
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aml_9HnFfRw
It appears that Albanians are exercising their tried and tested Albanian economic model, children as currency. ( For Albanians, It's Come to This: A Son for a TV)
That's what the civilized world needs now is more criminals and backwardness. Will all Kosovar Albanians at some point in their lives be looking forward to retiring in a prison some day?
Since only intellectual frauds and simpletons could fall for such machinations it thoroughly explains why only Albanians seem to heartily believe in this mythology.
Bonly boy, you’ve never even seen Serbia.
"I shall simply relate a personal experience, and I hope to be forgiven for crudity. I went to stay for four days in Kosovo with my national service regiment, the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards, which was on duty there. In the presence of the then colonel, David Allfrey, and the then second in command, now colonel of the regiment, Ben Edwards, I was able to talk at length with some of the local Albanian leaders. I would not have had that conversation had not the guns of the British Army been behind me, because they were pretty rough customers. They were truculent, saying, to put it crudely, "Of course we're going to win—we have the power of the penis." By that, they meant that they were going to use population to achieve their objective—greater Albania. Some of us who opposed involvement in Kosovo from the beginning thought that we were being taken for a ride—twisted around the little finger of people whose agenda was very different from what Britain and the United States thought they wanted. The way in which we were manipulated by the Albanians must teach us a lesson."
Since only intellectual frauds and simpletons could fall for such machinations it thoroughly explains why only Albanians seem to heartily believe in this mythology.
Ping to Wraith, your fellow countrymen apparently share your sentiments.
Rotten Totten on the road again seing things trough biased glasses in his 2. part, again and again with all of his moronic posters who cut-copy-paste eachother and M.T. is agin pleased with that:
http://www.michaeltotten.com/archives/2008/06/the-road-to-kos.php
I`m sorry if it`s already posted here.
“Alexander’s mother, Olympias, was Illyrian and he had Illyrian levies in his army but I agree the name isn’t Greek in origin”
“Those ancient Macedonians were not Hellenic people either. They spoke a different language similar to that of the tribes of Epirus and Illyria. This is well-documented. All indicators and historical records point toward Macedons being just another Thraco-Illyrian tribe, speaking a different dialect, like the Albanian Ghegs (descendants of Illyria) and Tosks (descendants of Epirus) speaking different but mutually intelligible dialects. It’s not a coincidence that today Macedonia’s greatest ethnic minority are Albanians.”
And Alexander is Illyrian = Albanian. Now this is sick.
That is complete revisionism, he’s an Albanian apologist.
is there anything else you can use? A few ‘gypsies’ begging or selling their kids doesn’t mean that much.
Have you gotten instructions to abandon the “Jihadi,” and “illegal alien” propaganda lines?
"On this day, against their own charter and without debate or a directive from the United Nations, the US led NATO military alliance bombarded Serbia and Montenegro for 78 days. NATO’s deadly armada left the civilian infrastructure of Yugoslavia in ruins, millions of innocent civilians homeless and thousands dead. The effects of the NATO aggression will be felt by the people of Southeastern Europe for decades to come." http://www.balkanpeace.org/index.php?index=/content/about.incl
Yes, that is "all you know" and it's wrong just like everything else that you post, Bonly boy.
Hey, maybe if the Muslims would have killed anyone you gave a damn about on 9/11, you'd see it differently instead of embracing Dhimmitude.
If liberalism is truly a mental disease, they must have caught yours too late. So far all you have posted is nonsense, insults and cut and paste terms.
What Dhimmitude are you talking about?
>>>>Hey, maybe if the Muslims would have killed anyone you gave a damn about on 9/11, you’d see it differently instead of embracing Dhimmitude.
Or if Serbs had killed or raped “killed anyone you gave a damn about,” or if your catholic church was destroyed by Serbs, you would think differently. If they are “Christian” why did they cooperate with the Turks against local Christians?
Tell your cousins not to give nukes to Iranian “Muslims” and Serbia to break the security agreement they have with Iran, the real “Muslims.”
Who are you fooling?
Or here is another question, what archeological evidence is there to support this Illyrian lineage hmmm Blatta? With illustrious historical figures like King Zog and Lek you may actually be able to intellectually hold your own against cro-magnon man.
“how much does one fetch for a white girl these days?”
it isn’t as much as you’d think. With Serbia’s economy in the drain (despite being the smartest people in earth!!!!) Serbian girls have flooded the market. It sucks but you can’t blame them. If the men can’t make a living the women have to do what’s needed.
read my previous post on evidence. It’s called DNA and not the BS you guys spew.
“Blatta Shqipus”
cross into your “cradle” and call an Albanian face to face a cockroach. No tanks this time or raping women, just men to men fighting. Try it there instead of spewing hate on a bulletin board. Until you try it, there is no need for Serbian bravado.
Historical figures
You worship someone who lost and begged for his life before being beheaded. What more can I say? After him all I read is vassalage with the Church’s blessing, and forcing Lazar’s daughter to join the Sultan’s harem because Serbs didn’t want to fight.
Basically... Serbs=Orthodox Christians=Good. All others=Bad.
By the way, how's your country doing on bringing that 6'9 monster back here, to be tried for his heinous act? Beating the crap out of a little guy, and then your embassy and government hiding him... How's THAT going?
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